Contribution to Understanding the Occurrence of Extractives in Red Heart of Beech

Abstract

Common beech (Fagus sylvatica) is one of the deciduous tree species characterized by the formation of a discolored red heart in the central part of the stem. The aim of this work was to review data in existing literature and to present original results on the extractives present in sapwood and the red heart of beech. Samples of sapwood and red heart were taken from freshly felled beech trees and extracted with a speed extractor. The content of lipophilic and hydrophilic extractives was determined gravimetrically and further evaluated by gas chromatography. The beech wood contained, on average, 1.04% lipophilic and 3.71% hydrophilic extractives. Even though the gravimetrically determined content of lipophilic extractives was comparable in the sapwood and the red heart, saturated fatty acids, fatty alcohols, and free sterols were dominant in the red heart. Sapwood contained a larger amount of total hydrophilic extractives. Mono-and oligosaccharides, sugar acids and alcohols, carboxylic acids, simple phenols, and flavonoids were identified as the prevailing hydrophilic solubles in sapwood, whereas the concentration of sugar alcohols was higher in the red heart. The composition and character of the extractives in the wood of red-hearted beech should be considered the relevant technological factor.

Chemical Composition and Antioxidant Activity of Extract from the Wood of Fagus orientalis: Water Resistance and Decay Resistance against Trametes versicolor

“…Like in our study with Chl and Chl + Water, more compounds are extractable by more polar solvent mixtures (Kubel and Weissmann 1988). Typical wood sugars such as glucose, galactose, arabinose, fructose, xylose, mannose, and rhamnose have been reported (Dietrichs 1964;Kubel and Weissmann 1988;Irmouli et al 2002;Vek et al 2013Vek et al , 2015. These sugars are mostly responsible for growth of fungi and other deteriorated agents that could not be extracted completely by Chl and Chl + Water, while ethanol and diethyl ether were able to extract sugar compounds of wood surface and inner sections of wood.…”

Determination of hydroxyl groups in biorefinery resources via quantitative 31P NMR spectroscopy

“…Proanthocyanidins are flavan-3-ol-based oligomers and polymers, also termed condensed tannins. They are ubiquitous in plants and constitute up to 40% of the dry weight of the bark in several species [45][46][47][48] . Their structures are depicted in Fig.…”

Removal of wood extractives as pulp (pre-)treatment: a technological review

“…Although the content of lipophilic extractives in wood is in general significantly lower than the hydrophilic one [69,70], methods for analyzing lipophilic extractives are more important in pulp and paper manufacture since they cause many problems like sticky deposits [55,71].…”